As a hatha yoga teacher, I plan to provide support and trained guidance, safe and nurturing spaces where you can explore and experience a refreshed sense of your own body, mind and spirit. Amazing shifts can start to happen through a regular yoga practice:
- Breathing becomes an incredible tool for self awareness
- Our minds become stronger and more focused
- Feelings settle, our hearts open & we find so much joy when we experience the sense of wholeness that our practice can bring. We feel more alive and happier – more vibrant.
I may be the outer teacher, but what I really strive to do is create the circumstances where students can quiet their minds and access their own inner wisdom and guidance.
Hatha yoga uses all of who we are – physically, mentally, emotionally, our most subtle and elusive inner nature – as the raw material for learning, seeing and integrating our entire being, opening us to our fullest imagination, intelligence, enthusiasm, energy and awareness of spiritual life. The term hatha derived from ha meaning “sun” and tha, meaning “moon”, symbolizing life force and consciousness.
Mark Stephens
Students come to yoga for many reasons – often it is to relax and decrease stress & find a sense of overall wellbeing. Sometimes it is because they are going through a difficult time & yoga is a way to experience wholeness and healing. It can also be sought to gain a sense of spiritual connection and to grow… or perhaps it is a combination of these things.
Yoga offers us a way for us to move our bodies and find alignment through poses or asanas, but it is truly so much more than that. While asanas feel great, they also ready us for breathwork (pranayama) and meditation, where the real magic happens because it is here that we link body, breath & mind and balance ourselves amidst this busy world. Meditation in particular helps us find a still point – a place of connection and peace within ourselves that is always unchanging, always at rest…….regardless of what is going on in our outer world.
Yoga teacher Rod Stryker says, “When we reach this place we no longer feel alone, we realise we are guided… despite what we are going through. By finding that thread to an inner beauty, stability and joy that is beyond the suffering, we can access untold beauty in this world beyond our senses”.
It is interesting we are quite weak in our capacity to conceive our outer world and there are lots of examples of it– for e.g., range of visible light observable to the human eye only makes up a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum – about 0.0035 percent.) Wolves and fish sense the magnetic pull of earth, birds and butterflies see ultraviolet light we usually can’t see. Dogs hear more than us. They think it’s about 99% of reality that we don’t see w our normal senses and our view of reality is based on such little information as a result.
We are encouraged to entertain the possibility there is this indeed untold beauty beyond what we normally see and that is why yogis thought to gather their mind, breath and body… and had the discipline and the practices that offer the possibility of seeing beyond these limitations and sense the great mystery that lies behind everything.
In this space, perhaps there is access to a greater level of self-knowledge as well and that part of us that stays unchanged and always at rest, always at peace and when we tap into that, it reminds us there is a never-ending sense of joy that doesn’t require circumstances to change in order to find well-being.
Tapping into this inner wisdom can prompt us to ask bigger questions of ourselves:
What am I here to do, how can I really serve and how do I offer my best self to this world?
